


Odd Jobs

by Sermocinare



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Coming of Age, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-22
Updated: 2011-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-17 05:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sermocinare/pseuds/Sermocinare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After giving away his inheritance, Adrian Veidt travels to the cradles of civilization, taking on various odd jobs to earn a living and learning a few things about life, and himself, along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Odd Jobs

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the kink meme

After his parents' estate has been settled, the executor asks him what he plans on doing with the money. Adrian tells him he doesn't know yet. Two days later, he buys a one-way ticket to Rome, and gives the rest of it to various charities, all of whom are of course very grateful for his generosity. They don't know how grateful Adrian is to finally be rid of it.

He arrives in Italy with little more than the contents of his backpack and enough money to last him two days. He is very well aware of the irony of this, the penniless American coming to Europe.

Finding an affordable place to stay is relatively easy, if you're not afraid to ask around. Most people are willing to help the 17-year-old boy, who seems a bit lost and out of place with his blonde hair and noticable accent. He rents a room at the boarding house of a nice widow who lost her husband in the war. It has running water - cold - and a bed. It's all Adrian needs. When she asks him what he's doing in Rome, he tells her that he wants to study the city and its past. It's true, in a way.

Next, he needs to find some way of earning money, because, for the first time in his life, the end of what he has in his pockets is the end of what's there. On the fourth day of his search - he is getting nervous and slightly desparate, his landlady has told him she gets her money on the end of the week, usually - he finally lands a job on the cleaning staff of one of the city's upscale hotels. At the end of the week, the old woman gets what he's been able to scrounge together in tips, and the promise that he'll pay her as soon as they pay him. She shakes her head and mutters something about young people and how they're always doing things willy-nilly without planning ahead, but she agrees since he's a nice boy and seems to be honest.

After a few days, the skin on his hands is reddened and cracked and his back and knees hurt from scrubbing floors. As he is sitting moping on the stairs to the employee's entrance in the back, one of his colleagues walks up to him. She is a short woman in her 40s - most of the others working this job are female - and Adrian remembers her name being Emilia. She smiles at him, pats his head and tells him to soak his hands in salt water before putting on a particular brand of healing lotion. He nods, thanks her, and as soon as he's recuperated a bit gets up and heads for the next pharmacy. He's grateful for her advice, even though he really didn't appreciate the pat on the head, which made him feel like a lost and lonely child.

Adrian quickly notices that the hotel guests tend to not notice him. It's not that they conciously ignore him, no. To most of them, he simply does not exist, except in those cases that he is either in the way or not doing his job well enough, at least in their opinion. At first, he tends to take every complaint very seriously. After a while, he learns to distinguish between those that are valid and those that are just made out of spite, anger or any other negative emotion the guest is currently carrying around and cannot unload on anybody else. When he vocalizes his musings on people treating other people like commodities, Emilia, who has decided to take him under her wing a bit, laughs and tells him a story about how one time, when she was cleaning a bathroom, the occupants of the room came back and started making out on the large bed without even so much as noticing her walking by on the way out. He laughs at her story, but doesn't believe it until something similar happens to him.

The one thing the job at the hotel has going for it is that he's usually done in the afternoon, which means he can explore the city. The third week, another one of his co-workers, a girl named Ginevra who can't be much older than himself, offers to take him to a few interesting and beautiful spots she's sure he'll never find on his own. She's friendly, with a melodious voice and a quick sense of humor, so he takes her up on her offer. And if he is quite honest with himself - and Adrian usually is - she's right. He would have missed out on a lot if it hadn't been for her. Which is why, a month later, he doesn't stop her when she leans in to kiss him. They are sitting on a bench, enjoying a spectacular view over the eternal city, her buildings washed in the light of a golden sunset, and she has her arm around his waist. They kiss a few times more, holding each other until the sun has set behind the hills. There's a train ticked in the pocket of his pants. He will be leaving for Istanbul in two days. He never tells her.

The train ride to Istanbul is uneventful to the point of being boring, and Adrian spends most of it asleep, feet tucked up on the bench, his back resting against his pack for safekeeping. It’s already long past sunset when the train finally pulls up into the station. The ticket has cost him most of the little money he was able to put aside in Rome, and it’s too late to go find something more permanent, so he checks into a seedy hotel near the main station. He doesn’t sleep much that night, and can’t wait to check out in the morning. He’d always thought that there wasn’t much that could really scare him, but that was before the rats. Their constant rustling, squealing and gnawing makes him long for home for the first time since he started this trip. But then, he doesn’t have a home any more. The thought makes his chest tighten, and he chides himself for it, tries to think of something else. Tries to sleep. Waits for dawn.

As if the city wanted to make up with him for scaring him last night, the next morning, Istanbul in bathed in light and the noise of people going about their business. And Adrian can’t help but be taken in by her charm, the unique blend of eastern and western culture. Sadly, he has no time for a deeper exploration of her mysteries. Right now, he needs to find a place to stay, and some means of earning money.

The latter is more easily found than in Rome. A few inquiries at local shops, hotels and restaurants later, he gets a job as a waiter in a rather large and, by the looks of it, always busy restaurant and coffee parlour on the European side of the city. The proprietor is delighted to hear that Adrian speaks several languages, among them English, French and Arabic, which makes up for the fact that his Turkish is a bit lacking. But the man reassures him – after all, he’s not there to converse with the guests, but to take orders and bring their food, and for that purposes, his limited vocabulary is sufficient. Adrian is to start tomorrow for the midday through evening shift, which leaves him enough time to find a place to stay. Or so he thinks.

The sun is once again setting behind the city’s jagged horizon, the wind carrying the sound of church bells and the melodious call to evening prayer, and he still hasn’t found a place to stay. One thing he is absolutely certain about, though – he would rather spend a night on a bench on the riverbank than return to the rat-hole. But as long as the city is still busy, and it is, there is still hope. He’ll find something. Somehow.

Walking past one of the many bars, which have expanded their seating areas out into the streets on this still-warm evening, his ears catch a familiar sound. Turning his head to see where those English words that stood out amongst the chatter of mostly unfamiliar Turkish came from, he notices a group of people sitting at one of the tables nearby. Three men, one woman, all only a little older than himself. Two of the men sound British, one’s an American, and the woman’s accent sounds like she’s probably French. From the snippets of conversation he’s hearing, Adrian concludes that they’re students at one of the local Universities. Not able to resist the lure of the familiar, especially in surroundings so decidedly unlike anything he has seen before, he walks over to them, introduces himself and asks if he can sit down with them. They welcome him to their midst, and after introductions, start asking him questions. Adrian lies about his age and the status of his schooling, telling them he’s an American who decided to take a break before entering college and is taking a tour of the cradles of civilization. When cornered, he admits that no, he hasn’t got a place to stay yet. The American, Phillip, grins and tells him that the third person him and Aude are flat-sharing with has gone back to Spain, and hey, why won’t Adrian have a look at the room? For once, Adrian doesn’t try to hide his relief, and gratefully accepts the offer.

Over the course of the next few days on his new job, Adrian learns that sometimes, being smart and hard-working isn’t enough. It’s more difficult than he would have thought, moving through a busy restaurant with a tray full of plates and glasses, and he almost drops the whole thing more than a few times, once even spilling something over a guest’s shirt and pants, which almost gets him fired on the spot, if the man hadn’t been adamant about how no, it wasn’t as bad as it might look, no problem there. After that, and the subsequent lecture by his boss, Adrian spends the next half hour desperately aware of the glowing heat in his ears, which of course doesn’t make things better. But he has always been a quick learner, and his natural grace and strength help him see to it that that was the last time something like this had happened. He learns how to prioritize, to discern what has to be done right now and what can wait for a minute or two. As soon as he has the internal layout of the place memorized, he plans his runs for the maximum of efficiency with the minimum of wasted time and energy. Surprisingly, after another two weeks, he finds that even though it isn’t intellectually stimulating, the job quite suits him. At least he gets to interact with people a bit more than he did cleaning rooms in Rome.

For intellectual stimulation, he visits the numerous libraries, some of which hold texts dating back to antiquity. Those afternoons and evenings he has off, he often spends with his flatmates and their friends, sitting in bars or at the river and discussing everything from music and movies to philosophy and politics. His acquaintances have varied, interesting and mostly liberal points of view, and their discussions are a lot more interesting to listen to and participate in than those his parents and their friends usually had.

It is during one of those evenings that Phillip mentions his older brother, who is an archaeology grad student currently working on a dig near Cairo, and speaking of Cairo, if Adrian is interested in how civilization as they know it came to be, he should definitely visit there some time. Phillip even goes so far as to offer to write to his brother and ask if they maybe need another pair of hands on the dig – and they almost always do, he assures – so that Adrian can come down there and see history being uncovered with his own eyes. Adrian takes him up on the offer, and two weeks later, he stands on the platform of the station he arrived at, ready to board a train that will take him to Egypt. They all embrace, and Adrian promises to write to them and tell them about his further travels. He keeps to his promise, only stopping to write once he is back in the States.

In Egypt, the sun sets early, earlier than he would have thought, sinking quickly behind the horizon, as if it cannot wait to be swallowed by the sky goddess Nut. Adrian doesn’t mind. Quite on the contrary, he welcomes the relief from the heat and the glare. The skin on the back of his neck and forearms feels hot and tight, and he winces as he leans his head back, the burning skin rubbing against the collar of his shirt. His whole body is flooded with a dull ache, muscles silently screaming from the abuse of having to haul what must have been tons of sand from one bit of desert to the other. He uncurls his hands, gingerly prodding at the blisters that have formed there. He had heard about history being written in blood, sweat and tears, but he never would have thought uncovering it would require the same. He cannot help but smirk at his own naïveté.

He takes an instant liking to Paul, Phillip’s older brother, and not only because Paul knows a remedy against pretty much every ache that plagues Adrian during the next two weeks. Every time his team finds something interesting – and to Paul, every shard of pottery is interesting – he calls Adrian over to have a look at it, explaining, if he can, what it is and what story might lie behind it. Adrian can’t help but be taken in by so much enthusiasm, and it is clear that the dark-haired man loves his job with a passion that surpasses even that of the professors.

Unlike the other hired hands that help with the dig, most of whom are natives to Egypt, Adrian is allowed to sit in on the team’s evening sessions, in which the day’s results are presented and talked about. A lot of times, the subject will stray from the bits and pieces that have been found to the overall goal of the dig and from that to more general subjects of Egyptology. Adrian sits with his back against a crate, knees drawn up to his chest, arms crossed above them with his chin resting on his forearms, and listens intently, soaking up facts about the Pharaohs and their achievements, some of which seem almost unbelievable, superhuman.

When he finds a small statue in the sand, he can’t help but beam with pride, carefully turning it between his fingers. And he feels something else, too, something hard to describe. He feels as if the small piece of stone, this fragile yet beautiful carving of a seated cat, is talking to him. Calling to him. He tells Paul about this, over a bottle of wine they are sharing, grinning and feeling a bit silly. But the other man assures him there is absolutely nothing silly about it. In fact, he seems to be proud of Adrian, who rationalizes the warm, giddy feeling in the pit of his stomach away with the empty wine bottle.

He stays in Egypt for longer than he had planned. Something, probably the atmosphere of the whole place, is keeping him. He spends a lot of time with Paul, who seems to enjoy his company. On some evenings, the venture into Cairo, eating strange food that becomes familiar over time, and sitting on the sidewalk in front of one of the many coffee houses, drinking tea and smoking shisha. Adrian is sceptical about it at first, still remembering the one cigarette he tried when he was fourteen, but like with the food, he quickly finds that he likes the taste.

On one of those evenings, the usual tobacco is replaced with hashish. Afterwards, Adrian can’t remember who came up with that idea. What he can remember, though, is the visions. Voices, colors and light, first changing, then swirling, then making a pattern clearer than the lines of shadow and light on the desert sand at midday. The pattern takes up his mind, fills it, and shifts him.

Soon after, Adrian will leave Egypt, and for the first time on this journey, for maybe the first time in his life, he knows exactly who he is and where he is going.


End file.
